There was a girl in my youth group in high school, a newcomer, who’d just had an abortion. She had just turned fifteen. We were at a winter retreat in the Berkshires and friend Rachel and she and I were back in the dorm-room style lodge. I don’t remember why, or where everyone else was.
The girl began to cry. It was right after chapel, and they’d likely been preaching on holiness or purity.
“I’m a whore!” she cried, and Rachel reached out to her, touched her shoulder.
“No you’re not,” Rachel said.
“I am!” the girl said.
I hated abortion. My mom had talked about it when I was too young to know what it meant, when she was pregnant with Spencer; since then I’d thought back in horror on what our lives would have been like without him.
Spencer was seven that year I was standing in the retreat lodge. I hated what this girl had chosen.
"I'm a whore!" she repeated, and I said the first and only thing that came to my mind.
“So?”
The girl looked at me, astonished, and her crying stopped. We were all astonished.
We stood there for awhile, we three, and I remember thinking that that was one of the truest things I’d ever said.
It still is, I think.
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